EDMONTON – The man who helped save the Edmonton Oilers and a world renowned psychologist are two prominent Albertans honoured with appointments to the Order of Canada.

Cal Nichols, entrepreneur and community builder, is perhaps best known for putting together the community ownership group that bought the Oilers in 1997 from Peter Pocklington. It was a key move that kept the team in Edmonton.

Nichols started with an Esso station in Saskatchewan in 1962 and by 1985, he created Gasland Oil, with its head office in Edmonton. The company grew to include more than 50 gas stations and convenience stores in Western Canada. In May 2002, he was inducted into the Alberta Business Hall of Fame.

The son of hard-working immigrant farmers, Bandura was inducted as an officer of the Order of Canada for his contribution to developing the discipline of social psychology. Bandura’s work uncovered the role played by children’s observation in human learning and aggression.

Over decades, he challenged the prevailing orthodoxies of Freud and others and rejected a medicalized model of human behaviour.

In a biography prepared by Stanford, Bandura, born in 1925, recalled the backbreaking work the family faced in carving out a farm near Edmonton.

His parents, immigrants from Poland and Ukraine, valued education so after high school in Mundare, Bandura headed to the University of British Columbia. Later, he completed a PhD at the University of Iowa in 1952 and a year later, he moved to Stanford. Much of his research set the foundations for social psychology. In his wideranging work he demonstrated human resiliency, showing for instance that people could get over phobias.

Bandura was still teaching at Stanford at age 82 and still has an office there.

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